NO. 1 CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA 137 
pottery griddles in the Amazon Basin is later by almost 2000 years, 
and the earliest examples are from the northern and western periph- 
ery. These cultural data seem to point to Colombia as the probable 
area for the domestication of manioc. 
If we may postulate that the environmental diversity characteristic 
of Mesoamerica was a contributing factor to the rise of plant domes- 
tication, it may be significant that similar combinations of high high- 
lands, humid low highlands, and seasonally to chronically rainy low- 
lands are present elsewhere in Latin America only in Colombia 
(fig. 18). We do not have sufficient evidence to determine whether 
similar environmental circumstances led to similar forms of experi- 
mentation with plants, or whether the stimulus to embark on this path 
was diffused from Mesoamerica. Unless the early manioc cultivators 
sought refuge in rock shelters and caves, as did the incipient agricul- 
turists in Mesoamerica, we may never know how close these infer- 
ences are to being correct. Whether the domestication of potatoes and 
other "root" crops derives from this same center is a matter of even 
greater speculation at present. 
About the same time that Mesoamerican contact brought maize to 
Momil, communications appear to have been reestablished with coastal 
Ecuador. By 200 B.C., and perhaps a few centuries earlier, Mexican 
types of figurines, pottery masks, flat and cylindrical stamps, and dis- 
tinctive types of pottery decoration such as postfired painting in lime 
green, yellow, black, white, and red appear with great abundance in 
sites ranging from northern Manabi into southern Colombia. A num- 
ber of other traits that later became more widely diffused in the An- 
dean Area also make their appearance on the coast of Ecuador at this 
time, including white-on-red, negative, and polychrome painting, 
annular pedestal and tripod supports, and the bridge spout. All ap- 
pear at our present state of knowledge to be older in Mesoamerica 
than in South America (fig. 19) . 
From this time onward, communication between Mesoamerica and 
the northwest coast of South America continued, perhaps with inter- 
mittent interruptions. These channels, most likely maintained by sea, 
brought the mold, metallurgy, ax money and other traits to Mexico, 
in exchange for the custom of drilling and inlaying the incisor teeth, 
secondary urn burial, and perhaps the construction of burial mounds 
and the manufacture of bark cloth. All these traits are earlier in Meso- 
america or in Ecuador than in the intervening or surrounding areas, 
where they form an erratic pattern consistent with their spread by 
random diffusion from the two primary sources (fig. 20) . 
In addition to influences resulting from interamerican contacts, 
